To just make some sort of lemmings sequel is an achievement on its own
Yes, that is true. I now feel bad for saying "you have to [...] to make it perfect." Didn't want to sound demanding - it was just that this topic is called "The
Perfect Blend", heh.
In my case, almost universally, one of the project goals is to create a game that everyone can enjoy.
That is good. A game just feels right even for a veteran if it appeals to everyone. I encourage you to keep this idea for any future development. The only thing to watch out for is to not overload the game with features. This can be hard if you'd like to include something from every game, all the brainstorming in this thread would have to be properly filtered first.
I just noticed that Simon has already gotten into one of those engines for a sequel that he has been making. Is it sort of like what Ive been describing?
For L++, I use Allegro and Enet. Allegro is a game library for C(++), it is pretty low-level. It offers routines for graphics, input, timers, sound, etc., but not any physics. Allegro lets one do enough low-level stuff to learn quite a lot about game programming while still being platform independent. An alternative to Allegro would be SDL.
Enet is a simple networking library. It's a bit more comfortable than working with sockets directly, but my client/server logic looks similar to what one would write with bare sockets. So I've again learned something while using it. :-)
I strongly believe in building new projects from the group up from scratch. Using some arbitrary software package or even code from previous projects promotes laziness more than good practice.
This is correct up to a certain level. The most low-level code that still produces graphics will probably be platform specific. I think it's okay to abstract this away a bit.
On the other hand, I wouldn't ever write a Lemmings clone in Gamemaker. It's point-and-click development that does lots of things for you and has a scripting language for the strange stuff. Many developing decisions aren't made by the creator, the tool does it for him. The resulting games won't run on Linux, not even under Wine, and I think older versions' scripting code won't work with newer Gamemaker versions. I have a friend who could rant about this evil tool every day. ;-)
-- Simon